During the referential matching process (which is used both during the add/update of customer records and during the query of customer records), Verato compares your customer records to Verato’s Reference Database of US identities.
For more information on how Verato Referential Matching, see the following video:
The Reference Database is a comprehensive, authoritative database of US identities with over 300 million identities. By comparing your customer records to the database, Verato can find matches between your customer records that may not be apparent based only on comparing your own records.
The Universal Identity platform uses a proprietary matching algorithm to determine if any of your customer records match each other (within your own record system) and/or match any Reference Database identities.
For each unique person identity in your customer records, Universal Identity assigns a unique identifier known as a Link ID. Within your private data tenant, your customer records are grouped together by a Link ID. For each unique person identity determined by Verato’s matching algorithm, there is a single Link ID with one or more of your customer records grouped by the Link ID.
For example:
- If you only have one customer record for Sally Smith, then the Link ID for Sally Smith is only associated with a single of your customer records.
- If you have three customer records for Sally Smith, then the Link ID for Sally Smith is associated with three of your customer records.
For example, perhaps you have two customer records for Sally that might not might not seem to match but could still be the same person: one record for Sally Smith in Chicago, IL and another for Sally Jones in Detroit, MI. Based on this information, the records do not seem to be the same person.
But the Reference Database contains the longitudinal history of Sally’s information and knows that Sally Smith changed her last name to Jones and moved to Detroit. She is in fact the same person, and Verato is able to match and link together (create a Link ID) the customer records using the Reference Database data as a reference.